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I have a relatively small database (6GB) and my application can access it quickly when using Firebird 2.1 or Firebird 2.5 on a non-server version of windows. But if I try to use Firebird 2.5 on a server version (2008, 2012) it gets painfully slow.

What I've tried already:

  • Set FileSystemCacheSize on firebird.conf to 50, 60 and 70% as noted here

Notes:

  • The problem happens on more than one machine
  • Unfortunately the problem is still not deterministic as we have tested with Win Server 2008 and 2012 on a simple desktop machine and the performance was very good but on some server hardware it ts slow.
  • Untill now the issue showed up only on Dell Servers

Hardware that shows the issue:

  • Dell Perc H310 SCSI

Hardware that don't show the issue

  • Dell Desktop Vostro

My question is, what should I look for to find out what is causing this performance issue?

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  • Already tried to restart the servers?
    – Dave
    May 15, 2014 at 14:51

2 Answers 2

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+100

The DELL PERC H310 is known to have performance issues in JBOD mode. DELL admits as much here: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/t/19480834.aspx?pi239031352=1

On top of that the PERC H310 has no write-cache option and can't be upgraded with a BBU. In other words, it is not suited for production-level RAID operation either. See link for feature set: http://www1.la.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/pvaul/topics/en/us/raid_controller?c=gt&l=en&cs=gtbsdt1

DELL recommends to only use the H310 in RAID1 mode with no more then 500GB storage space, see the first link for reference.

As far as I can judge it, you now have three options:

  1. replace your HDDs with SSDs. The SSDs superior performance will mitigate the atrocious H310's performance.
  2. replace the H310 controller with something useful, e. g. LSI MegaRAID or 3Ware.
  3. create a RAID1 with no more than 500GB of storage space.
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This Firebird tracker issue may pertain to the same problem :
Slow performance in firebird installed on windows server 2008 promoted to domain controller.

The solution there was to enable write-caching, although it was remarked that some Dell models do not allow this tweak.

See :

Firebird vs Windows: file-system caching issue
Write-Caching - Enable or Disable.

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